News stories by Kanya D'Almeida, page 5

On Dec. 1, 1955, at the height of racial segregation in the United States, a little-known middle-aged seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery City bus in the southern state of Alabama.

Two days ago, on Jun. 7, Ana Fabricia Cordoba was killed in the Santa Cruz neighbourhood of Medellin, Colombia. A community leader with the women's organisation Ruta de Pacifica de Mujeres working with displaced workers, Cordoba had been receiving death threats, which she reported to the police and national government.

On Feb. 11, while the world was celebrating former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's fall from power, CBS television correspondent Lara Logan was being 'mercilessly assaulted' by a group of well over 200 men in a dark corner of Tahrir Square.

Last year, the online branding company East-West Communications ranked Mexico 191st out of 200 countries on its Brand Perception Index, which is generated by analysing buzzwords in the international media's quarterly and annual coverage of a certain country.

Today one billion people are living in hunger, not because of scarcity of production or a shortage of food on shelves in the global marketplace, but because they 'lack the most basic purchasing power needed to acquire it', Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, said Thursday.

Every year on Jun. 1, the People's Republic of China pulls out all the stops — hosting festivals, printing greeting cards and sponsoring public games and parades — in celebration of International Children's Day, a holiday widely acknowledged to have originated with the rise of communism and now observed primarily in communist or former communist countries.

As controversy mounts over the efficacy of microfinance as a global poverty-alleviation effort, the 15th Global Microcredit Summit, scheduled to kick off on Nov. 14 in Valladolid, Spain, will be forced to answer critical questions about poverty, resources and tactics.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) lived through a famine that killed, at conservative estimates, nearly a million people in the 1990s, and is now nearing the brink of a second food disaster, according to an extensive study conducted this year by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

A week after U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 sanctioned air strikes against the regime of Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi in Libya, U.S. President Barack Obama made clear that it would not be U.S. planes maintaining the No-Fly Zone (NFZ). Rather, the effort to safeguard Libyan civilians would be led primarily by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

By a few minutes before midnight on May 1, huge jubilant crowds had amassed outside the White House in Washington D.C. and around Ground Zero and Times Square in New York City.